LA CAÑADA FLINTRIDGE >> Although humans won’t ride aboard NASA’s InSight Mars lander, millions of earthlings are expected to fly-by-name to the red planet next year, the agency announced this week.

People could add their names to a silicon microchip that will be incorporated into the InSight Mars lander, which is the first NASA mission dedicated to investigating Mars’ deep interior.

“Our next step in the journey to Mars is another fantastic mission to the surface,” said Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a statement. “By participating in this opportunity to send your name aboard InSight to the Red Planet, you’re showing that you’re part of that journey and the future of space exploration.”

Online submissions will be accepted until Sept. 8. Participants will receive a boarding pass indicating InSight’s planned launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on March 4, 2016. The exact March launch date, however, is yet to be determined and will likely depend on weather conditions.

InSight will place the first seismometer on the martian surface to measure quakes and to learn about the planet’s interior via seismic waves. The lander will also use a self-hammering heat probe to dig deeper into the red planet’s ground than any previous NASA device. The goal is to learn more about the formation and evolution of rocky planets, including Earth.

The “fly-your-name opportunity” is the second time NASA offered people a chance to earn “frequent flier” points to reflect how often they partook in faux-astronaut travel. The program is scheduled to span many missions and multiple decades.

The first time the “frequent flier” option was available was with NASA’s Orion spacecraft, which flew in space for about 4.5 hours on Dec. 5. Some 1.37 million people vicariously journeyed aboard the test flight of a spacecraft built to put humans into deep space, NASA said.

The next “fly-your-name opportunity” will be Exploration Mission-1, the first test flight that will use both the Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule. NASA intends to use these technologies to put humans on Mars, on asteroids and into deep space.